I'm stunned that that's still in my brain. I never would have remembered it my brain not been able to pattern match
against the ID number in the article.
I did. I still recall running up $400 for a monthly bill from chatting with random people around the U.S. I seem to recall it was $0.08/min at some point beyond your allotted time.
I downloaded a national BBS list from there eventually, stumbled upon one or two amazing local BBSs, and that was end of Q-Link for me.
I think my first isp after using compuserve for a while was netcom. No idea what happened to them but they gave me a shell account and pine and tin and gopher and the I has a very happy camper...
I was a Netcom guy also. I used them right up until I got cable HSI service (which in my area wasn't until late '01 or early '02). Netcom as a company disappeared somewhere in the late 90s; I don't know exactly what the story was, but I recall getting a letter saying that I was suddenly going to be a MindSpring customer, and then a few months (or so) later, an EarthLink one.
Their domain names and email addresses lived on through all that though, and I still occasionally see an "@ix.netcom.com" floating around.
When I finally canceled my service with them, after getting the cable modem installed, I was pretty bummed that they didn't have some minimal level of service that would have just let me keep my email address. (AOL offered something like this at the time.) I probably would have paid $3-5/mo just to hang onto it because I'd had it for so long.
Ah, well. They were one of the better dialup ISPs I had; I never had trouble getting access numbers in various cities, and they had fairly responsive support. Quality declined precipitously after the Mindspring/EarthLink buyout though; I had no love for them as a company by the end.
Being on Compuserve with a blazing fast 140 baud modem was expensive.
My buddy being busted for plagiarizing a paper from Compuserve in 1986..Priceless.
No. And, yes, long since expired. UniSys held the patent, CompuServe was the victim (and the actual innovator, since they invented the GIF format, which happened to use Limpel Ziv...it was a submarine patent for many years until GIFs were pervasive; very nasty business).
Careful now, GIF uses Lempel-Ziv-Welch or LZW, which was patent encumbered in the US until 2003, and a few other countries until 2004. Not all Lempel-Ziv compression algorithms were patent encumbered though: LZ77 with Huffman coding is the DEFLATE algorithm which is very widely used, since that's the algorithm used in PKZIP/gzip/zlib.
